Re: Which partitioning schemes should be supported by GRUB?

[Colin Watson]

On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 08:07:35AM -0500, address@hidden wrote:
> Colin Watson wrote:
> > I can think of an alternative.  We do still need grub_install_dos_part
> > and grub_install_bsd_part for the multiboot trampoline, which is in
> > assembly, so it's difficult to abandon them altogether.  However,
> > there's no reason we need to use them in make_install_device.  How about
> > we invent a way to encode most of the information in string form in
> > grub_prefix, while leaving a placeholder for make_install_device to fill
> > in the disk?  There are 64 bytes available for grub_prefix, which should
> > be plenty.  For example, how about the following (with \0 standing for
> > ASCII NUL):
> >
> >  (\0,msdos1,bsd1)/boot/grub
> >
> > It's then just a matter of spotting the "(\0," sequence and replacing
> > the \0 with the drive name.  I think this can probably be done using
> > less code than the first option above, and all told it feels a bit less
> > hacky to me.
> 
> Instead of doing string replacement, why not just define a
> disk-relative partition format?

Simple string replacement would be much easier to implement, and
probably smaller.  Plus, we don't need disk-relative device naming
elsewhere, and I think it would require putting platform-specific code
(otherwise how do you know which disk to be relative to?) in places that
are otherwise pretty platform-independent.

> Also, the '\0' seems unnecessary.  Is having "(," meaningful in some
> way already?

Good point.  This would be sufficient.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       address@hidden